Why I Stopped Trusting Lightroom for Sharpening (And What I Use Instead)

Why I Stopped Trusting Lightroom for Sharpening (And What I Use Instead)

There’s a photo from last winter that I almost deleted. I’d hiked out before sunrise to catch the light hitting a frost-covered fence line, and the shot was beautiful in my head, but the RAW file came back soft and noisy in a way that Lightroom just couldn’t rescue cleanly. Sharpening in the Detail panel helped, but it introduced those tell-tale wormy artifacts along the edges. I kept the photo, but I wasn’t happy with it.